


A life, recovered

by Lady_Ganesh



Series: Streamverse [3]
Category: Saiyuki
Genre: AU, Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-06
Updated: 2008-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-09 06:33:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/84094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Ganesh/pseuds/Lady_Ganesh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A side story to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/84078">Stray.</a> Thanks again to Eleanor K for betaing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A life, recovered

Brian Cheng smiles when he has a visitor. He doesn't get many any more. For a while, there were all kinds of people; reporters, lawyers, victim's advocates, children's advocates. But now that his case is all but settled, the visitors have settled back down to a trickle. Mostly it's his lawyer and social worker, now, once or twice a week. Soon, he'll be free, and they'll be out of his life, too.

When I first met Brian, he was sixteen, convicted of seven bloody murders. We spoke through a glass partition. I found myself staring at his handcuffed wrists; I could hear the shackles on his ankles every time he shifted his weight, which was often. Brian Cheng was clearly an energetic kid.

Now Brian is just a month shy of eighteen. He's in a transitional facility for juvenile offenders, though everyone agrees he was wrongfully convicted of his crimes. It's just a place to hold him until the court hearing which will finally clear his name-- at least, in the eyes of the law. Now we sit across from one another at an oversized round table, in colorful Eames chairs purchased decades ago. Brian is still energetic, but he's older now, more measured, far closer to man than boy.

When he was fourteen and a half, he was staying in a foster home just outside the city limits. There were eight kids in all: six foster children ranging from eight to sixteen and the Mayes' own children, fifteen-year-old Julia and seventeen-year-old Will.

The foster home was, in the words of Maria Hernandez, county supervisor for social work, "not a good fit." The Mayes were traditional, discipline-focused, church-goers; Brian was creative, boundary-pushing, and -- perhaps most significantly -- openly gay at a young age. They clashed. Neighbors reported loud, angry fights. The Mayes petitioned for a new placement. Their social worker, Tori Smithson, told them to try to work it out.

Two weeks later, Smithson was found dead at the Mayes home, along with four of the six foster children and Alan and Cheri Mayes. The killer had used a knife from the Mayes home; the fingerprints had been hastily wiped off with a kitchen towel. Brian Cheng came home to a crime scene. His foster brother Will, who'd been on a date with his girlfriend, arrived to find his immediate family dead and his foster brother arrested for murder.

"See, here's the problem, right here," Tom Lee, Brian's lawyer tells me, when I meet with him later over coffee. "You see what they did, don't you? They immediately jump on Brian. Never mind any other suspects, the kid's been having problems, he's got no alibi, he's toast." Lee works in the Civil Rights division of the Center for Justice, a nonprofit group of defense attorneys who focus on social issues. "Was it because he was the foster kid, so he didn't have any family around to defend him? Was it because he was Asian, or gay? I don't know. I mean, I can speculate-- I _have_ speculated, at great length-- but I don't really know. You can't take the measure of someone's heart, they say. And certainly we don't have evidence of the kind of blatant discrimination we see all too often. But it doesn't add up well. They didn't interview Will's girlfriend. They don't have any evidence about Will's activities beyond his word. They don't ask what other parties might be interested in the family-- business deals, family grudges, anything. Alan Mayes owned his own construction company, and there'd been credible rumors about Mafia ties for years. Did they investigate any of that? No."

Within a few days, there was no need to investigate further. Brian Chang's fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, a kitchen knife whose tip was found in Cheri Mayes' collarbone; there was a bloody footprint leading from the doorway that matched his shoeprint; no witnesses came forward to say they'd even seen Brian at the movie he said he'd attended that night. Brian was charged and tried as an adult, and sentenced to life in prison for taking seven innocent lives.

When I first interviewed Brian Cheng for a series on conditions at prisons throughout the state, I had no doubt in my mind about his guilt. He'd been convicted; the physical evidence was clear; Will Mayes himself had said he'd been afraid of Brian in the weeks before the murder. I had met plenty of criminals; charismatic con men, angry killers, sly, persuasive thieves. I knew that everyone in prison, or almost everyone, said they were wrongly convicted. I knew the most innocent-looking packages could hide the darkest secrets.

Still, I wasn't prepared for the sweet, open-faced boy I met. There was a gentleness to him, even after almost two years of adult prison, including months of 'special custody' and solitary confinement. "What's the weather like?" was the first question he asked me, and he-- unlike so many others, especially teens-- didn't waste time protesting his innocence or trying to win me over to his side or way of thinking. Instead, he stared at his hands and talked about what he missed-- the rain, the sun, having people around he could talk to without fear of recrimination. "It's cold here, too," he said. "I don't like how cold it gets in the winter."

I talked with him for almost an hour. It shook me. When I returned to my office, I spent hours looking over his case, trying to find any detail, any evidence that might prove the courts wrong. But everywhere I looked, the case was open and shut. Brian Cheng was guilty; I'd just let my affection for him overwhelm my reason.

But this time my instincts were right.

A year after I met Brian, a cop in another state found something that would change Brian's life and-- eventually-- grant him his freedom.

Craig Nguyen was a promising young officer. A Vietnamese-American raised primarily by Buddhist monks in Hong Kong, his background was hardly conventional, but he was smart and driven.

Nguyen was working for Internal Affairs, investigating a broad corruption scandal that had already crossed two counties, when the wiretap he'd worked so hard to authorize finally hit paydirt. He'd been listening to the phone of County Examiner Charles "Mac" Mackenzie for two days when the call came in. It was a cop from another state, Tim Jackson, asking for a favor:

_Mac: So you want, you want what I did last time?_

Jackson: Yeah, yeah. This is a nasty one. I want it gone.

Mac: Like Mayes or like Tam?

Jackson: F--k, I don't care. Just gone. Surprise me, willya?

Mac: As good as done. I'll let you know what you need to do.

Jackson: Appreciate it.

Nguyen would testify later in court that he'd expected to find corruption, but nothing so naked or blatant. Subsequent investigation revealed what "Like Mayes" had meant-- a quick rush to judgement followed by evidence doctored to follow the conclusion. Tim Jackson had been the lead detective on the case.

A little poking, and the case against Brian Cheng fell apart. The bloody footprint had been faked; there were dozens of fingerprints on the murder weapon, some Cheng's, many from the Mayes family, still more unidentifiable.

"A total joke," Lieutenant Nguyen said when I met him. He was still spending most of his time on the case, wrapping up details and testimony in a case that had grown to span three states, four cops, and one deeply corrupt medical examiner. Nguyen is just shy of thirty now, and had spent the better part of two years working on the Mackenzie case before it finally cracked open. He's of average height, and unusually attractive for a cop, with elegant features and dark, arresting eyes. "I'm up to my ass in this guy's shit, but the Mayes case was even more ludicrous than most of them."

I asked him to explain. He tapped his fingers anxiously on the table; I had heard he'd recently quit smoking. "Most of the cases were just laziness. 'Oh, we know who did it, this is fine.' This one, though-- you have to put a lot of work into flat-out faking evidence. You have to be really desperate or really pissed off."

"So which do you think it was?" I asked.

He pulled a packet of gum out of his pocket. "Who the fuck knows? You'll drive yourself crazy if you spend too much time on root causes." Neither Jackson nor MacKenzie cut a deal with prosecutors; Jackson is currently appealing a conviction for falsifying evidence and corruption, and MacKenzie's case is still in court as this article goes to press. "The bitch of it is we'll never find out what happened that night, now. The evidence is all shit; the witnesses are corrupted. It's a mess. Seven people dead and we'll never fucking know who, or why." He popped the gum into his mouth and chewed.

"But surely, you must have some idea," I protested. "Weren't MacKenzie and Alan Mayes both linked to organized crime?"

Nguyen shook his head. "Not their style," he said, "or at least their usual MO. Mayes was laundering money; there's no indication he was turned or that anyone suspected he might. Unless they were trying to set some kind of example-- and they had no reason to, that anyone can tell-- there was no point in racking up that kind of body count. Then there's Will Mayes; the girlfriend had been coached pretty carefully, but she's never gone back on her story, either. And Cheng still could have done it. But no court in this country would ever get a conviction based on what we have now. For any of them. It's a pile of shit."

"That's a rather blunt assessment, isn't it?"

He shrugged. "It is what it is."

I learned later that Nguyen had something of a reputation for being blunt. "He's a grade A asshole," Tom Lee says flatly. "But he saved Brian's life. I told him once that Brian wanted to meet him, and he said 'Why?' I told him Brian wanted to thank him. He wouldn't do it; he didn't get it. To him, it was just doing his job."

To Brian Cheng, however, it's something far more. "He's from Vietnam," he tells me, with a strange, endearing mix of eagerness and shyness. "They found him on one of the boats, but no one would claim him. A baby, can you believe it?" He has collected data on Nguyen like a teenage girl keeping track of her crush. And there is an element of a crush in his admiration, but also a respect and gratitude that cannot be easily measured. "He's going to make detective from this," Brian tells me. "I'm sure of it."

Brian's own future is far less certain. Tom Lee is currently suing the state in hopes of getting a financial settlement for the years that Brian's lost; but no monetary settlement can make up for years of isolation and abuse. His facility has given him rudimentary job training and access to the Stream; he's made a few friends and hopes to get his GED completed before he leaves.

I ask him if he's nervous about life outside the facility. "A little," he confesses. He wants to learn how to drive; he tells me he's always wanted a truck, a red or blue one. "Or maybe purple," he says. "Something crazy." He plans on leaving the state, maybe going to California. He has not spoken to his foster brother Will since his arrest; he doesn't plan to. (Will Mayes declined to be interviewed for this article.) But even those questions are something. Brian Chang has a future again.

"What's the first thing you're going to do when you get out?" I ask him.

"Buy a hot dog," he tells me, grinning. "The food here _sucks."_


End file.
